The History of the Calculator

8/11/2019 The History of the Calculator

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The history of the calculator

Article Category:Units

If you need an illustration of the accelerating speed of technological change, look no further thanthe electronic calculator, that modest little device that does the most complex sum instantly andthat you hold in the palm of your hand.

Or more likely dont any more for the pocket calculator, which took more than four millenniato evolve and only reached its current form in the 1990s, is already obsolescent, if not actuallyobsolete.

The history of the calculatoris split into two pages and has four main chapters:

1. Beginnings: The Mechanical Age

2.

Business Calculator: The Electronic Age3.

Pocket Calculator: The Microchip Age4. Calculators Now: The Virtual Age

Beginnings: The Mechanical Age
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TheAbacus: Bean counters friend

In the very beginning, of course was the abacus, a sort of hand operated mechanical calculatorusing beads on rods, first used by Sumerians and Egyptians around 2000 BC.

The principle was simple, a frame holding a series of rods, with ten sliding beads on each. Whenall the beads had been slid across the first rod, it was time to move one across on the next,showing the number of tens, and thence to the next rod, showing hundreds, and so on.

It made addition and subtraction faster and less error-prone and may have led to the term bean

counters for accountants.

But that was where the technology more or less stuck for the next 3,600 years, until thebeginning of the 17th century AD, when the first mechanical calculators began to appear inEurope. Most notably, the development of logarithms by John Napier allowed Edward Gunter,William Oughtred and others to develop the slide rule.


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The Slide Rule: good enough for Dr. Strangelove

The slide ruleis basically a sliding stick (or discs) that uses logarithmic scales to allow rapidmultiplication and division. Slide rules evolved to allow advanced trigonometry and logarithms,exponentials and square roots.

Even up to the 1980s, knowing how to operate a slide rule was a basic part of mathematicseducation for millions of schoolchildren, even though by that time, mechanical and electriccalculating machines were well established. The problem was that these werent portable whilethe slide rule fitted into the breast pocket of your button-down shirt.

Real Rocket Scientists used slide rules to send Man to the Moon - a Pickett model N600-ES wastaken on the Apollo 13 moon mission in 1970.

Gears, Wheels and Buttons

The first mechanical calculator appeared in 1642, the creations of French intellectual andmathematics whizz kid Blaise Pascalas a device that will eventually perform all four arithmeticoperations without relying on human intelligence.

Pascal's machine used geared wheels and could add and subtract two numbers directly andmultiply and divide by repetition. Gottfried Leibniz then spent the best part of his life designinga four-operation mechanical calculator, based on his ingenious slotted Leibniz wheel, butultimately failing to produce a fully operational machine.
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The Arithmometer: Soldiered on till 1915

That had to wait until 1820 and the patenting in France of Thomas de Colmars four functionArithmometer.

This first commercially viable counting machine was manufactured from 1851 to 1915 andcopied by around 20 companies across Europe.

By then, the main tide of innovation had moved across the Atlantic, with the development ofhand cranked adding machines like the Grant Mechanical Calculating Machineof 1877 and,more famously the P100 Burroughs Adding Machinedeveloped by William Seward Burroughs

in 1886.

This was the first in a line of office calculating machines that made the Burroughs family fortuneand enabled the son, William S. Burroughs, to pursue a career consuming hallucinogenic drugsand writing subversive novels like The Naked Lunch.


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The Comptometer: Press key calculating at last

A further step forward occurred in 1887 when Dorr. E. Felts US-patented key driven

Comptometer took calculating into the push button age. This machine, too, spurred a host ofimitators.

The Curta calculator, which first appeared in 1948, was perhaps the ultimate expression of themechanical calculator, so compact that it could, somewhat lumpily, fit into a pocket and capableof addition, subtraction, multiplication and division.

Machines like this ensured that mechanical calculators dominated 20th century office life all theway through to the late 1960s. By then, electronics were beginning to take over, as we shall seein the next part of this series.

Curta calculator: mechanical could be compact

Business Calculator: The Electronic Age


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The story of the electronic calculator really begins in the late 1930s as the world began toprepare for renewed war. To calculate the trigonometry required to drop bombs into a picklebarrel from 30,000 feet, to hit a 30-knot Japanese warship with a torpedo or to bring down adiving Stuka with an anti aircraft gun required constantly updated automated solutions.Thesewere provided respectively by the Sperry-Norden bombsight, the US Navys Torpedo Data

Computer and the Kerrison Predictor AA fire control system.

All were basically mechanical devices using geared wheels and rotating cylinders, but producingelectrical outputs that could be linked to weapon systems.

During the Second World War, the challenges of code-breaking produced the first all-electroniccomputer, Colossus. But this was a specialised machine that basically performed exclusive or(XOR) Boolean algorithms.

ENIAC: less processing power than a non-smart phone.

However, it did this using hundred of thermionic valves as electronic on/off switches, as well asan electronic display.

The application of this technology to the worlds first general calculating computer had to waituntil 1946 and the construction of the ENIAC(Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer)as a completely digital artillery firing table calculator also capable of solving "a large class ofnumerical problems", including the four basic arithmetical functions.

ENIAC was 1,000 times faster than electro-mechanical computers and could hold a ten-digitdecimal number in memory. But to do this required 17,468 vacuum tubes, 7,200 crystal diodes,1,500 relays, 70,000 resistors, 10,000 capacitors and around 5 million hand-soldered joints. Itweighed around 27 tonnes, took up 1800 square feet of floorspace and consumed as much poweras a small town. Not exactly a desktop solution.

Valve and Tube Calculators


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Electronic calculating for the office had to wait on the miniaturisation of valves and thedevelopment of solid state transistors.

ANITA: First desktop all electronic calculator.

The first step was seen in 1961 with the arrival of ANITA(A New Inspiration ToArithmetic/Accounting). This was the worlds first all-electronic desktop calculator and it wasdeveloped in Britain by Control Systems Ltd., marketed under its Bell Punch and Sumlockbrands.

ANITA used the same push button key layout as the companys mechanical comptometers, butthese were the only moving parts. All the rest was done electronically, using a mix of vacuumand cold cathode Dekatron counting tubes.

The illuminated 12-place display was provided by Nixie glow discharge tubes. From 1962, twomodels were marketed; ANITA Mk. 7 for continental Europe and the Mk. 8 for Britain and therest of the world, with the latter soon becoming the only model. These early ANITAs sold foraround 355 ($1,000), equivalent to around 4,800 ($8,000) in todays money.

Nevertheless, as the only electronic desktop calculator available, tens of thousands of ANITAswere sold worldwide up to 1964, when three new transistorised competitors appeared; theAmerican Friden 130 series, the Italian IME 84, and the Sharp Compet CS10A from Japan.

Transistor Age Calculators


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Friden calculator: First CRT display.

None of these were functionally superior to ANITA, nor cheaper (the Sharp CS10 cost around$2,500 in 1964) but their all-transistor designs opened the floodgates to a new wave of electronic

calculators.

These came from the likes of Canon, Mathatronics, Olivetti, SCM (Smith-Corona-Marchant),Sony, Toshiba, and Wang.

Four of these Beatles-era transistorised calculators were especially significant, includingToshibas "Toscal" BC-1411calculator, which was remarkable in using an early form ofRandom Access Memory (RAM) built from separate circuit boards.

Olivetti: Programma 101: Worlds first PC?

The Olivetti Programma 101introduced in late 1965 was an elegant machine that won manyindustrial design awards. It could read and write to magnetic cards and display results on itsbuilt-in printer.

As a desktop electronic calculating machine that was programmable by non-specialists forindividual use, the Programma 101could even claim to be the first personal computer.


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From behind the Iron Curtain the same year emerged the ELKA 22designed by BulgariasCentral Institute for Calculation Technologies and built at the Elektronika factory in Sofia.

Built like a T-64 tank and weighing around 8 kg, this was the first calculator in the world toinclude a square root function.

Texas Instruments Cal Tech: shape of things to come. Photo credit: Texas Instruments

All electronic calculators to this point had been bulky and heavy machines, costing more thanmany family cars of the period.

However in 1967, Texas Instruments released their landmark "Cal Tech" prototype, a calculator

that could add, multiply, subtract, and divide, and print results to a paper tape while beingcompact enough to be held in the hand.

A new chapter in the calculator story was opening...

Continue on to part 2 of our story of the history of the calculator,where we look at the microchipage and the virtual age.

History and Story Behind Inventions:

Calculator or Adding Machine
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About the story behind the invention of the calculator or

adding machine, history and biography of Door Eugene Felt

and William Seward Burroughs invention.

INVENTION: Adding Machine

INVENTOR: Door Eugene Felt, U.S.; William Seward Burroughs, U.S.

YEAR: 1887-1888

HOW INVENTED: Until these 2 years, most accountants and clerks did their calculating withpencil and ledger. Said Felt, "I knew many accountants could mentally add 4 columns of figuresat a time, so I decided I must beat that in designing my machines." Felt constructed the 1st key-driven adding-machine model. "It was near Thanksgiving Day of 1884, and I decided to use theholiday in construction of the wooden model. I went to the grocer's and selected a [macaroni]

box." Using meat skewers for punch keys, staples for key guides, elastic bands for springs, Feltbuilt his model with a jackknife.

He convinced his employer, Robert Tarrant, to back the invention. In 1887, they became partnersin selling the Comptometer, for 15 years "the only multiple order key-driven calculator on themarket."

While Felt was creating the more accurate machine, Burroughs was inventing the moremarketable one. Burroughs, a mechanic's son who became a mechanic himself, applied for apatent for his Adding and Listing Machine in 1885, obtained the patent 3 years later. At the ageof 28, he was vice-president of his own American Arithmometer Company, in St. Louis, Mo. In

1899, Burroughs produced 50 adding machines. However, only he and one field salesman couldoperate them. The salesman, says A Computer Perspective, "operated his so well that he refusedto sell it, preferring to haul it from saloon to saloon in a wheelbarrow, betting drinks on itsaccuracy." Later, when Burroughs invented an automatic device that made his machine readilyusable, he went to the storeroom where the original 50 were kept, took them one by one, andheaved them out the window.

Calculator

In 1642 Blaise Pascal designed and built a mechanical adding machine. It was the first mechanical

calculator in history.

In an 1822 paper presented to the Royal Astronomical Society, English mathematician Charles Babbage

proposed a difference engine, an automatic, mechanical calculator designed to tabulate polynomial


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functions.

The first successful adding machine in the United States was patented in 1888 by William Seward

Burroughs.

In 1889 Herman Hollerith was issued US patent #395,791 for the 'Art of Applying Statistics'

his

punched card calculator.

In 1948 the Curta calculator, a hand-cranked, barrel-shaped calculator small enough to fit in the pocket

and capable of basic calculations was introduced.

The first portable calculator placed on sale by Texas Instruments in 1971 weighed only two and a half

pounds and cost a mere $150.

The first slimline digital pocket calculator was the Sinclair Executive, which was launched in 1972. It cost

about three times the average weekly wage but set the standard.

The History of the Calculator

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